Mulberry Wands (6 page)

“So how’s the job going?” Darius asked.

“My boss is nice, and the job is easy, but
I’m not really learning that much about investigating,” Susan said.
“How about you?”

“I got ninja burrito-making skills. Whooaaa!”
Darius mimed a karate chop in the air. Then he shrugged. “The guys
I work with are cool. They invited me to this house party next
weekend. I talked you up and they want me to bring you, cause mages
are phat.”

“You are such a liar. No one thinks mages are
phat.”

“Yeah, I’m telling you. Magic is in right
now.”

“Bullshit.”

Darius grinned. “Okay, you’re right, you’re
still the queen of geeks, but they’ll still dig you. Seriously,
chica, you need to stop moping and start socializing.”

“I went out with Amber, and what are you, my
mother? Even Ruby doesn’t harass me like this. I get plenty of
socialization.” Susan didn’t find anything useful in the trash, but
she saw the branch of what looked like a pomegranate tree, and she
stood on a concrete block to reach it.

“Then go with me just to be with me. They
told me I should bring a hottie.”

“I’m flattered, but I’m still not dating
you.” The tree had only one pomegranate within reach, and it wasn’t
ripe yet. She could tell without even opening it that the seeds
inside would be pale with just a hint of pink. Good enough. She
wasn’t going to eat it, she was going to use it for a spell.

“You don’t dig on the black guys?” Darius
asked from behind her. “Or does the half-faerie shit weird you
out?”

“No, it’s cause you’re still jailbait.” She
slipped as she grabbed the fruit, and accidentally broke off a
piece of branch as she fell, but Darius grabbed her and helped her
down so she didn’t hurt herself. She’d forgotten a bag, so she
tucked the pomegranate into the bottom of her t-shirt and made a
little knot to keep it there. “You look like a man, but the law
says you aren’t, so you and I are doing nothing that resembles
dating.”

“Yeah, I’m all man, baby.” Darius grinned
again.

He really was cute, and Susan liked hanging
out with him more than most of the other friends, but she couldn’t
help thinking of him as a kid brother. A sixteen-year-old girl
could seem like a woman, but a sixteen-year-old boy was a child in
a man’s body.

“It doesn’t have to be a date. Just come out
with me.”

Susan cleared her throat. “I kind of met
someone last weekend.”

“You said you went out with Amber.”

“I did,” Susan said. “I met this really cool
guy. Sounded like he wanted a second date, so I’d kind of like to
keep my weekend open.”

“He call you yet?” Darius asked. “No, I can
tell he didn’t. You call him?”

“I don’t have his phone number.” They walked
past a house with a wooden gate that shook from the force of dogs
jumping up against it from the other side. The dogs barked
furiously, and Susan wondered if the gate would hold. “He said he
just moved into town and didn’t have one yet.”

“Uh huh,” Darius said. “Just moved into town,
doesn’t have a phone yet. Right.”

Susan kept walking past the dogs, around the
corner to another house that had cleaned out their garage. Darius
was right. It sounded like a lie as soon as she said it out loud.
What a dimwit she was, falling for something like that. She lifted
up the edge of a discarded mattress to see the appliances
underneath. But why would he lie? “He seemed nice.”

“Susan, not that you’re not a fine piece
of…not that you’re not a pretty girl, but if something’s not on the
level with this dude, don’t see him again. What if he’s working for
the MIB? You know they still got a file open on you.”

“I don’t think he works for the Magical
Investigation Bureau,” Susan said. She tried to sound confident,
but Darius had a good point.

“And what if he’s a gnosti?”

“That’s ridiculous.” She scoffed, but now she
was really suspicious. There was something weird about him.

“Just look him up, is all I’m saying. I mean,
Ruby’s got your back, right? She could have gotten you any job at
all, and she got you one with a private investigator.”

“She didn’t get me the job, I applied for
it.” Susan had carpet-bombed the Internet with résumés.

“She got you the job,” Darius insisted. “And
even though I’m always giving you shit about ‘your demon’ we both
know that she’s looking out for you. Look into this guy. Better
yet, blow him off and go to this party with me next weekend. And
borrow one of Zoë’s leather miniskirts.”

“Zoë’s miniskirt? Yeah, right. And what would
I wear on the other leg? I’ll think about it,” she said, though she
had already decided she didn’t want to go to a house party with a
bunch of drunk high school kids, especially if she was the only
white girl there. Darius was cool, because he was her friend, but
except for him she couldn’t stand teenagers. Even when she’d been
one, she couldn’t stand them.

“So, what are you really doing in the alley,
besides picking fruit?”

“Looking for spell components.”

“More stuff for your demon?”

“Goddess,” she corrected, knowing it would
make him grin because he just said “demon” to piss her off. “And
yeah, but there’s something else I want to know too.” She told
Darius about the dead faerie and about her plan to investigate.
“Ruby said I shouldn’t get involved in others’ troubles, but it
doesn’t seem right to just let this be.”

“Yeah, I’m with you there,” Darius said. “We
gotta take care of our own. Poor people don’t got no one to look
after them.”

“Darius, your dad owns a half million dollar
house, and your mom is a member of a royal family. Why are you
talking like your people are poor?”

Darius grinned and shrugged. “So how are you
going to investigate? Look for clues? Talk to the other garden
fey?”

“I couldn’t find any clues, and in case you
haven’t noticed, garden fey don’t talk. So, I’m stumped.”

She needed some magnets too, and when she saw
a computer, she used her fingernail as a screwdriver and began
unscrewing the back panel in hopes that there was some kind of
magnet inside. It took her longer than she would have liked, as
they were Phillips head screws and her fingernails were kind of
short, but eventually she got it open and pulled out the hard drive
to get the magnets off. Darius amused himself by breaking up a
cracked window pane into smaller pieces.

A truck came down the alley from the other
end, and it stopped by a pile of branches. A guy got out and
started rooting through the branches, loading up some of them into
the back of his truck.

“Looks like someone else is doing the Mexican
yard sale thing,” Darius said.

“Wonder what he’s after?” Susan asked.

“Firewood maybe?”

They didn’t get to ask him. By the time she
finished getting the magnets off the hard drive, he’d loaded up all
the branches he wanted and took off.

Susan brushed dirt off her jeans and put the
magnets into her pocket, then headed down the alley in search of …
in search of something. Thing was, she didn’t quite know what she
was looking for. She had four spells to do, three for her cousin
Hadley and another one to get her information about the fey. She
knew she needed magnets for one of the compulsion spells, and she
needed the pomegranate for the spell to give her third cousin some
self confidence, but she needed other things too, and she wasn’t
quite sure what they were. She thought she needed some kind of nut.
Something about nuts and wisdom? Pecans, maybe? She wasn’t quite
sure how to begin, which was a crappy trait in an investigator. It
was easier at work. At work, you just started with the phone book.
Gnosti didn’t have phone books, did they? Was there a spell she
could do to find the missing information?

She should know this. Technically, she was a
mage who’d been doing this her whole life. At least, she was in the
body of someone who had been doing this her whole life. That
counted for a lot. In some ways, she felt more and more like Susie
every day. Susie’s memories overcame her own memories. Susie’s
interests appealed to her more too. But sometimes things didn’t
mesh quite right.

Sometimes she tried to do something that
Susie had done as easily as playing a scale in C, and found that
she didn’t have the first clue how to go about it. In those cases,
it was best to just let her thinking brain shut off and do things
completely on intuition. It was like when you were trying to
remember how a tune went. If you pushed at it, it never came. You
had to think about how the tune made you feel, and where you were
when you heard it, and sooner or later you’d find yourself humming
it and tapping out the notes.

Susan picked up a cloudy piece of glass with
a flower etched on it. Intuition said she needed it. She also got a
metal spring from a mattress, some moss that had been growing on a
utility box, and eight sprigs of pine, plucked from a branch that
was pushing through a leaning wooden fence.

When she got back to the house and read
Susie’s spellbooks, she found that intuition had gotten her
everything she needed for Hadley’s spells except beeswax, linen,
and hair from the target (target being Hadley).

She still didn’t have any idea how to
investigate the murder of the dead fey, so she did two things she’d
never done in her entire life.

She exhumed a corpse, and she went to work on
her day off.

When Susan wanted to see gnosti, all she had
to do was concentrate on her third eye, as though someone were
lightly touching her between the brows. It would start to tingle,
and a moment later, any garden fey or other magical creatures
around would appear. She wondered if Brian would be able to see
this little fey now that he was dead. Was their invisibility
something intrinsic, based on the fact that they weren’t entirely
of this world, or was it a power they had to exert to keep
themselves safe? She’d asked Maggie once, but Maggie didn’t have a
clue. Susan went to work, carrying the body in a shoebox filled
with ice. It smelled like the dead sparrow that got stuck between
the bedframe and the wall for a few days when it flew back there
trying to escape Zoë’s cat and couldn’t get out again.

“Son of a bitch, what’s that smell?” someone
said, as Susan walked down the hall of the office complex.

Well, that’s one metaphysical question
answered. They were in this world enough that the non-mage types
could sense them. Susan pushed open the door to the office and
looked around until she found her boss.

Brian was tall, blond, ruddy complexioned,
and perpetually cheerful. Susan had never seen him not smile. Even
when he called in from the field, he sounded like he was smiling on
the phone. It kind of worried her at first, and she waited for the
other shoe to drop, but after a few days of working for him, she
realized she was dealing with the rarest of rarities: a genuinely
nice guy.

Brian was scanning a database when she came
in, feet resting on the edge of his L shaped desk. He was flipping
a pen around his thumb absentmindedly, and occasionally stopped
long enough to check a name off a list. He looked amused, as though
he were doing something fun instead of gruntwork on a Saturday, and
when he saw her come in, he dropped his feet off the desk and stood
up as though he’d been waiting for her to arrive.

“Hey, Susan! What brings you here? Come to
keep me company?” He wrinkled his nose at the smell, but didn’t
lose his cheerful expression. “Or do you need some help with
something?”

“Hi, Brian, yeah, um, so remember how you
said if I needed investigation advice you’d be happy to help? Well,
I need it now, if that was a serious offer.” She set the box on the
edge of his desk. “I want to know how to investigate a murder.”

“Leave it to the cops,” he suggested. For the
first time, he looked less happy. “What are you involved in,
Susan?”

“I tried to figure this out on my own, but I
don’t know where to begin.” She lifted the lid.

Brian pressed the back of his hand against
his nose. She’d filled the box with most of the dirt the fey had
been buried in (it was a very shallow grave) in part to keep the
smell down, and in part so she didn’t have to look at it very
closely. She’d set the whole lump on top of an ice pack that she
was fairly sure she’d never use again. The bottom of the shoe box
was getting a little soggy from the condensation, so she slipped
the lid underneath it to keep it from ripping open.

Brian pulled open a desk drawer and pulled
out a pair of latex gloves. He slipped them on and began to pull
lumps of dirt out of the box, setting them on top of the scrap
lettuce and parchment paper from his sandwich. A moment later he
gasped, and brushed dirt away from the corpse’s face. “Is that what
I think it is?”

Did he see the same thing she saw? “What do
you think it is?”

“A gnosti. A magical creature.”

“Yeah,” Susan said. “I found it in my
backyard. I’m concerned, and I want to find out who killed him and
why. They don’t usually kill each other unless it’s one garden fey
eating another.”

“Usually? You see them all the time then?”
Brian gently lifted the corpse from the box. It was totally bloated
now, and the rigor mortis had worn off. The abdomen writhed as
though something were crawling around inside. “Did you take photos
of the place where the body was found?”

“No, I didn’t think of that. I looked for
clues, but I didn’t find any.”

Brian inspected the decaying body, moving it
back and forth, bending the legs and arms and brushing off the skin
as though looking for marks. She had to think of the fey as an ‘it’
or she didn’t think she’d be able to hold her lunch. It, the
corpse, seemed like a ghastly fleshy doll. Except for the size, it
looked like a dead human. The eyes were gone, and the side it had
been laying on was kind of purplish and flat, imbedded with bits of
dirt from where the flesh had pressed into the earth. The smell was
horribly strong, considering how small it was.